With the growth of the Internet, networks are used to communicate increasing amounts of information. In order to locate desired information from the Internet, many websites provide users with information search services. When searching for information on a website, users provide search conditions corresponding to the user's search intentions. The website finds the information corresponding to the search conditions and provides the found information to the users so that the users can easily find the information that the users need.
Information search systems typically include a plurality of merging servers and a plurality of processing servers. Referring to FIG. 1, an information search system includes a plurality of processing servers 12 being deployed in a plurality of rows and columns providing users with large-scale, highly concurrent search services. The plurality of processing servers 12 is organized into an M×N matrix including M rows and N columns. Each column includes M processing servers and each row includes N processing servers. The information in the information search system is divided in advance into N groups. The processing servers in each column can store one of the groups of information, and each processing server in one column can store the same information.
When a user conducts an information search, the client device that the user uses can transmit an information search request including the search conditions to a merging server. The merging server selects one processing server from the plurality of processing servers of each column. The merging server selects a total of N processing servers and sends the received information search request to each of the selected processing servers. After receiving the information search request sent by the merging server, the processing servers each search within their stored information for information satisfying the search conditions and sends back the found information to the merging server. After the merging server receives the information sent by the plurality of processing servers, the merging server combines the received information and then sends the combined information back to the client device used by the user. The client device provides the received information to the user.
The user, by using the client device, can review the information found by the processing servers to locate the desirable information. If the user wishes to view the information published by a certain information publisher or wishes to view information belonging to a certain category, the user may repeatedly click, browse or perform other such actions with respect to the various pieces of provided information to determine whether the information is desired, and in doing so that the user would waste processing resources.